“Another major aspect of this contemporary paradigm is the acceptance of contests as being the only possible means by which to publish a book.

“I know people who have recently been in classes in MFA programs whose teachers stated very bluntly, “you must enter contests in order to publish.” This is unacceptable and writers as a whole should not accept this as fact. If the writers did not affirm contests by entering them, then the whole problem would go away on its own accord.

“Contests do nothing but two things. First, they impose a fee where there never used to be a fee, and second they force the publisher to publish a book no matter how bad it is as long as it is better than the others in the contest. No one wins in the contest model.

“All of these fees, contest fees, reading fees, MFA fees, and the acceptance of these as the only paradigm in which writers may be assessed put money at the heart of the art. By putting money at the heart of the art we as a society have completely given the art over to capitalism and greed and ladder-climbing and survival of the fittest, not survival of the art.

“The current paradigm is allowing money to become the arbiter of taste; those with the money to obtain the MFA and pay to submit both to magazines and to book contests will be deemed poets. Those without these means will be left behind in the dust even though much of their work is equally as good if not better.

“The whole paradigm is setting itself up to discriminate along socio-economic lines, and this is something that everyone should be working against in this day and time.

“It was bad enough when the publishing community made poetry a commodity, but the current paradigm ignores the poetry altogether and has established the poets themselves as the commodities.”

Huffington Post Interview with New York Quarterly Editor Raymond Hammond Incredible summation of what’s wrong with the MFA today.

Notes

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